"There are moments when one has to choose between living one's own life, fully, entirely, completely-or dragging out some false, shallow, degrading existence that the world in its hypocrisy demands."
— Oscar Wilde (Lady Windermere's Fan)

"Meaning and morality of One's life come from within oneself. Healthy, strong individuals seek self expansion by experimenting and by living dangerously. Life consists of an infinite number of possibilities and the healthy person explores as many of them as posible. Religions that teach pity, self-contempt, humility, self-restraint and guilt are incorrect. The good life is ever changing, challenging, devoid of regret, intense, creative and risky."
— Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche

"We are all in the gutter, but some of us are looking at the stars."
— Oscar Wilde (Lady Windermere's Fan)

"Be yourself; everyone else is already taken."
— Oscar Wilde

"To live is the rarest thing in the world. Most people exist, that is all."
— Oscar Wilde

"Most people are other people. Their thoughts are someone else's opinions, their lives a mimicry, their passions a quotation."
— Oscar Wilde

"The books that the world calls immoral are books that show the world its own shame."
— Oscar Wilde

"I don't want to go to heaven. None of my friends are there."
— Oscar Wilde

"Education is an admirable thing, but it is well to remember from time to time that nothing that is worth knowing can be taught."
— Oscar Wilde

"Women are made to be loved not understood."
— Oscar Wilde (An Ideal Husband)

"I can resist anything, except temptation."
— Oscar Wilde

"I have nothing to declare except my genius."
— Oscar Wilde

"The public have an insatiable curiosity to know everything, except what is worth knowing."
— Oscar Wilde (The Soul of Man Under Socialism and Selected Critical Prose)

"An idea that is not dangerous is unworthy of being called an idea at all."
— Oscar Wilde

"Disobedience, in the eyes of any one who has read history, is [hu]man's original virtue. It is through disobedience that progress has been made, through disobedience and through rebellion."
— Oscar Wilde

"Nowadays most people die of a sort of creeping common sense, and discover when it is too late that the only things one never regrets are one's mistakes."
— Oscar Wilde (The Picture of Dorian Gray)

"Conformity is the last refuge of the unimaginitive"
— Oscar Wilde

"Laughter is not at all a bad beginning for a friendship, and it is by far the best ending for one."
— Oscar Wilde (The Picture of Dorian Gray)

"You don't love someone for their looks, or their clothes, or for their fancy car, but because they sing a song only you can hear."
— Oscar Wilde

"Because to influence a person is to give him one's own soul. He does not think his natural thoughts, or burn with his natural passions. His virtues are not real to him. His sins, if there are such things as sins, are borrowed. He becomes an echo of some one else's music, an actor of a part that has not been written for him. The aim of life is self-development. To realize one's nature perfectly -- that is what each of us is here for. People are afraid of themselves, nowadays. They have forgotten the highest of all duties, the duty that one owes to oneself. Of course they are charitable. They feed the hungry, and clothe the beggar. But their own souls starve, and are naked. Courage has gone out of our race. Perhaps we never really had it. The terror of society, which is the basis of morals, the terror of God, which is the secret of religion -- these are the two things that govern us."
— Oscar Wilde

"The gods are strange. It is not our vices only they make instruments to scourge us. They bring us to ruin through what in us is good, gentle, humane, loving."
— Oscar Wilde (De Profundis)

"nothing that is worth knowing can be taught"
— Oscar Wilde

"A man who does not think for himself does not think at all."
— Oscar Wilde

"Between men and women there is no friendship possible. There is passion, enmity, worship, love, but no friendship."
— Oscar Wilde

"Don't walk behind me; I may not lead. Don't walk in front of me; I may not follow. Just walk beside me and be my friend."
— Albert Camus

"Nobody realizes that some people expend tremendous energy merely to be normal."
— Albert Camus

"Should I kill myself, or have a cup of coffee?"
— Albert Camus

"Idleness is fatal only to the mediocre."
— Albert Camus

"The only way to deal with an unfree world is to become so absolutely free that your very existence is an act of rebellion."
— Albert Camus

"There is but one truly serious philosophical problem and that is suicide. Judging whether life is or is not worth living amounts to answering the fundamental question of philosophy. All the rest — whether or not the world has three dimensions, whether the mind has nine or twelve categories — comes afterwards. These are games; one must first answer."
— Albert Camus

"What is a rebel? A man who says no."
— Albert Camus

"After all manner of professors have done their best for us, the place we are to get knowledge is in books. The true university of these days is a collection of books."
— Albert Camus

"Always go too far, because that's where you'll find the truth"
— Albert Camus

"He who despairs of the human condition is a coward, but he who has hope for it is a fool.
"
— Albert Camus

"Friendship is less simple. It is long and hard to obtain but when one has it there's no getting rid of it; one simply has to cope with it. Don't think for a minute that your friends will telephone you every evening, as they ought to, in order to find out if this doesn't happen to be the evening when you are deciding to commit suicide, or simply whether you don't need company, whether you are not in the mood to go out. No, don't worry, they'll ring up the evening you are not alone, when life is beautiful. As for suicide, they would be more likely to push you to it, by virtue of what you owe to yourself, according to them. May heaven protect us, cher Monsieur, from being set upon a pedestal by our friends!"
— Albert Camus (The Fall)

"Life can be magnificent and overwhelming -- that is the whole tragedy. Without beauty, love, or danger it would almost be easy to live. "
— Albert Camus

"Every act of rebellion expresses a nostalgia for innocence and an appeal to the essence of being."
— Albert Camus (The Rebel: An Essay on Man in Revolt)

"…. Query: How contrive not to waste one's time?
Answer: By being fully aware of it all the while.
Ways in which this can be done: By spending one's days on an uneasy chair in a dentist's waiting-room; by remaining on one's balcony all of a Sunday afternoon; by listening to lectures in a language on doesn't know; by traveling by the longest and least-convenient train routes, and of course standing all the way; by lining up at the box-office of theaters and then not buying a seat; and so forth."
— Albert Camus

"It was as if that great rush of anger had washed me clean, emptied me of hope, and, gazing up at the dark sky spangled with its signs and stars, for the first time, the first, I laid my heart open to the benign indifference of the universe. To feel it so like myself, indeed, so brotherly, made me realize that I’d been happy, and that I was happy still. For all to be accomplished, for me to feel less lonely, all that remained to hope was that on the day of my execution there should be a huge crowd of spectators and that they should greet me with howls of execration."
— Albert Camus

"A beautiful woman risking everything for a mad passion. A few wild weeks of happiness cut short by a hideous, treacherous crime. Months of voiceless agony, and then a child born in pain. The mother snatched away by death, the boy left to solitude and the tyranny of an old and loveless man. Yes, it was an interesting background. It posed the lad, made him more perfect as it were. Behind every exquisite thing that existed, there was something tragic."
— Oscar Wilde

"My life-my whole life- take it, and do with it what you will. I love you-love you as I have never loved any living thing. From the moment I met you I loved you, loved you blindly, adoringly,madly!

You didn't know it then-you know it now."
— Oscar Wilde (Lady Windermere's Fan)

"Experience is simply the name we give to our mistakes"
— Oscar Wilde

"To give an accurate description of what has never occurred is not merely the proper occupation of the historian, but the inalienable privilege of any man of parts and culture."
— Oscar Wilde

"One's past is what one is. It is the only way by which people should be judged."
— Oscar Wilde

"Live! Live the wonderful life that is in you! Let nothing be lost upon you. Be always searching for new sensations. Be afraid of nothing."
— Oscar Wilde (The Picture of Dorian Gray)

"An idea that is not dangerous is unworthy of being called an idea at all. "
— Oscar Wilde

"Most people are other people. Their thoughts are someone elses opinions, their lives a mimcry, their passions a quotation."
— Oscar Wilde

"To get back my youth I would do anything in the world, except take exercise, get up early or be respectable."
— Oscar Wilde (The Picture of Dorian Gray)

"To add a library to a house is to give that house a soul."
— Marcus Tullius Cicero

"It is a great thing to know your vices."
— Marcus Tullius Cicero